Monday, February 28, 2011

Blogging Carnivals are an excellent tool for gathering readers from an already established site's readership base. They are also an excellent tool for the host in gathering content, quality links, and in building trust and respect among your readers. So it is big win-win endeavor. If you are the host of a monthly blogging carnival, be sure to provide your participating bloggers with the oppurtunity to succeed in your blogging carnival.

Tips For Helping Your Blogging Carnival Run Smoothly

Announce Your Monthly Topic Early - It is important to give your participating bloggers, ample time to construct a quality post for inclusion into your monthly blogging carnivals. I like to give almost a full month for my participants to develop their posts. Announcing the topic early has a ton of advantages. The earlier you set the topic the more likely that other bloggers will have time to work up a post for your carnival. If you wait until a week before the carnival goes live, then you risk lack of participation due to lack of time. Also by announcing a week out, you are forcing a lot of posts within your niche on the same topic to appear around the same time. This can lead to many of those posts being skipped as they are "just another one of those carnival entry posts". If you announce your topic early, the featured articles can appear throughout your blogging niche for the entire month and prevent a bunch of similar topics going live all across your blog roll simultaneously.

Make Your Topic Focused, But Open - Pick a topic that has multiple avenues for discussion. If you pick a would you A or B type topic, then chances are you are going to have a ton of repeated information across all the participating blogs. This is poor planning without thinking of the reading experience for visitors.

Make Your Link Requirements Fool-Proof - Growing your carnival is much easier, if all participants are linking back to your carnival page. Some carnivals use an image, while others use text links to promote the carnival on the participants' sites. If you require linking, be sure to post the code for the proper linking so that it can be simply copied and pasted into the article. This will save you having to double check each entry and ask for corrections. Make it easy for your bloggers to add your code.

Remind Potential Participants - Some bloggers are very busy and will forget about the approaching deadline for submission. Be sure to send out friendly reminders as well as tweet reminders with a link to the current topic to your followers. We are all busy and tend to forget things. A gentle reminder can help to increase your participation as well as build trust that you genuinely want others to participate.